A lot of attention has been given over to the fact that this is the bicentennial year of Frederic Chopin. On Tuesday, another Romantic composer will also turn 200, and his music, and his life, are as interesting if not more so than Chopin, even if his music is less universally beloved.
Robert Schumann was one of the rare composers to be as much of writer of words as he was a writer of music. Perhaps only Richard Wagner rivaled him for the ability to synthesize literary ideas into sound. His life was also marred by ongoing struggles with mental illness, which ultimately led to an untimely end in a mental hospital, two years after he tried to drown himself in the Rhine.
Schumann, like Tchaikovsky and Telemann, was actually trained as a lawyer, but his passion was for music. His talent for writing led him to be well-known as a music reviewer and editor of the Journal for New Music. Indeed, in this capacity, he helped launch Chopin's career by writing a review stating, "Hat's off, a genius!" Later in life, he did the same for Johannes Brahms.
Although Schumann's piano music is -- believe me! -- technically demanding, Shumann was not a virtuoso pianist. Rather, most of his piano music was written for his wife, Clara Wieck. The two met when Robert studied piano with her father, and she was a girl of 16. Her father strongly disapproved of the marriage, filing court affidavits that Robert was a drunkard and mentally unstable. (Perhaps this was untrue at least at the time, but it's possible Robert was already showing signs of the mental illness that would cut short his life.) The two did marry, and she served as Robert's muse, as well as being a composer and performer in her own right. Robert's piano career ended when he attempted to strengthen his ring finger by means of a mechanical contraption that wound up destroying the tendons in his hand. Perhaps it was his inability to play, coupled with the knowledge that his wife could play anything, that makes his music so different from Chopin's or Lizst's. The latter composers' works can be very difficult, but all fit within the hands. Schumann's does not.
Schumann's music moves away from abstract forms (Sonatas, rondos, etc.) in favor of programmatic compositions. Some of his best known music includes the piano suites "Papillons" (or butterflies), "Carnaval," "Fantasiestuke" (or "Fantasy Studies," including well-known pieces such as "In the Night," and "Dream Visions.") He wrote a 35 minute suite called "Kreislereana," after E.T.A. Hoffman's stories of Johannes Kreisler, an emotional poet and conductor. Schumann no doubt identified with Kreisler, and other of his pieces include explicit descriptions of his own character. He divided his musical character into "Florestan" and "Eusebius," and notated his scores indicating which side of his psyche was responsible for that piece. Florestan, named after a character in Beethoven's "Fidelio" was passionate and extroverted. Eusebius was moody and introverted. Schumann also composed a series of technical studies, called the "Symphonic Etudes," and wrote pieces for children (or evocative of children) called the "Kinderszenen." One of those pieces, "Children of Many Lands," is among my personal favorites, and "Traumerei" is among his best known.
Here are some examples of his piano music:
Vladimir Horowitz playing "Traumerei"
Martha Argerich playing first movement of the A-minor Piano Concerto
Sviatoslav Richter playing "In the Evening" and "Soaring" from "Fantasiestucke"
Caudio Arrau playing selections from "Carnaval."
Schumann was also well regarded as a composer of "lieder" or art songs. This suited his interest in literature, as he often set to music pieces by German Romantics like Goethe. Perhaps the best known is the "Dichterliebe," based on poems by Henrich Heine depicting the emotional journey of a scorned lover.
Here are Helene Grimaud and Thomas Quasthoff performing a song from the Dichterliebe: http://www.youtube.com/...
In the 1850s, Schumann had an unsuccessful conducting career with the Dusseldorf symphony. As a symphonist, he wrote 4 full-scale works, and an overture to Byron's "Manfred." He also wrote an opera called "Genoveva," which is rarely peformed but in many ways pre-figures the work of Richard Wagner in abolishing traditional arias, choruses, and recitatives. (Interestingly, some sources report that Schumann was interested in composing an opera based on the Nibelungen sagas, though Wagner found that you really need four operas to do the trick.) Some more music:
The First Movement to Symphony No. 1 (Spring) as conducted by Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic: http://www.youtube.com/...
Herbert von Karajan in rehearsal for Symphony No. 4 with the same orchestra (a few years earlier), which in a way does more to show the emotional power of the symphony than a performance does: http://www.youtube.com/...
Schumann's mental state fell apart in the early 1850s, and he attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine river. While he was rescued, he was committed to an asylum and he died two years later. There is some speculation that he suffered from syphilis, although this has never been confirmed. (I tend to think not, since Clara never showed symptoms of it.) However, Clara was aware of his mental decline and destroyed some of his later scores, which she thought were the products of an irrational mind.
Robert's music, even that which Clara did not destroy, to this day stands out for its strangeness. Chopin, reportedly, did not return the admiration, though Chopin's music is also a lot weirder than is often assumed. Both Chopin and Shumann moved their music away from traditional tonality. For example, in Schumann's "Fantasy in C," the "C" does not really appear until after the piece establishes an F-chord. (Performed by Mikhail Pletnev in the link.) So, the very beginning of the piece is off-balance. Other of his pieces use dissonant harmonies and the types of harmonies we would later associate with jazz. A good example is the start of "Krieserliana" (as performed by Evgeny Kissin). For people used to thinking of classical music as Mozart or even Brahms, this just "feels" different. Schumann's pieces are also often rhythmically disjointed, as Chopin's music (he of the steady left hand) does not. "In the Evening," the first piece of the "Fantasiestuke," the accent switches to the off-beats after the 12th bar, for example.
Schumann's music is allusive, complex, and literary, but melodic and deceptively simple. His life was that of a quintessential tortured artist. His work is worth exploring, and if you are fortunate enough to live somewhere that has a good classical radio station, perhaps there will be a celebration of his work for you to enjoy.
I realize I overlooked his chamber music, and probably a lot more. Yours to the comments!
[For further reading, I recommend Charles Rosen's "The Romantic Generation" for a more in-depth study of his background, philosophy, and technical analysis, with an emphasis on his piano music and lieder. David Dubal's "The Canon of Classical Music" has a good overview of his life, key works, and recommended recordings. And wikipedia, of course. If you can see concerts of his work, you can also learn a thing or two from the programs or from CD liner notes.]